The Reform Party’s overwhelming victory in the recent Staffordshire County Council elections has cast a deep shadow over efforts to act on Climate, Nature and the Environment. Reform’s national stance on Climate Action is well known – their manifesto explicitly calls for Net Zero to be ditched as an ‘expensive waste of time’. According to DeSmog, 92% of the party’s donations since 2019 has come from sources associated with the fossil fuel industry or climate deniers.
As has already been well-publicised, Nigel Farage has already said that anyone with climate (or diversity) in their job title should be ‘looking for another role’. With Reform likely to use Staffordshire as a laboratory for their ideas on local government, first signs aren’t good; there is no Cabinet member to replace Simon Tagg, who previously had responsibility for Climate Change and the Environment.
Early signs from other Reform-controlled counties indicate a similar abandonment of climate priorities. Staffordshire has so far worked through a number of broad channels: through policies including its own Climate Plan, through supporting community groups, and in co-operation with the county’s districts and boroughs.
The latter work includes sectors such as EV charging points – while SMDC has installed some of its own at key locations such as Moorlands House, the County is responsible for a wider roll out though the centrally-funded LEVI (Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure) scheme.
Community-oriented programmes such as Waste Savvy Staffs (with whom MCA works closely) and the Staffordshire Green Network may also come under scrutiny. The future of the Staffordshire Sustainability Board may also be in doubt as may the Community Climate Fund which has historically provided the core funding for the HuG festival as well as supported the Repair Café (via Charlotte Atkins, no longer at Stafford, of course).
HuG, our free entry Moorlands Green Arts Festival, celebrates its fifth anniversary when it returns to the Foxlowe on Saturday 28 June from 10.00am to 4.00pm.
This year we are celebrating all things hedgerows and verges. MCA is a partner in the Nature in Your Neighbourhood project, along with Staffordshire Wildlife Trust, Keele University, OUTSIDE Arts and SMDC, which supports communities in the Staffordshire Moorlands improve green spaces where they live and monitor habitat health.
As ever there will be a wide range of stalls showcasing a variety of arts and crafts using different materials, all produced with an environmental ethos.
Faced with the poor and sometimes worsening state of their rivers, ordinary citizens can feel powerless. Who to call, how to get remedial action? Is it the water company’s fault, shouldn’t the Environment Agency be on the case? And it can be difficult – there are so many potential causes of problems, ranging from farming run-off, failing sewage infrastructure through to species invasion. The list flows on... But there is a way that ordinary residents can act – through the fast developing and exciting world of citizen science.
Across the country, concerned residents have turned to monitoring the state of the watercourses they hold dear, presenting the information in a compelling way and, in some cases, forcing officialdom to act. The best-known instances are those in the Wye Valley, where intensive poultry farming is the chief culprit, or the Windrush in the Cotswolds, where sewage spills have literally turned stretches of a once-beautiful river into a brown soup.
The problems in the Moorlands are not yet quite as dramatic, but they are real. As is the case across the country, all rivers fail the overall test of good health because of the presence of forever chemicals. But beneath that catch-all chemical failure, the picture in the Moorlands is more mixed, as the map in the Rivers Trust’s State of Our Rivers Report 2024 shows.
Of the rivers in the district, only the Manifold largely classes as ‘good’. The Dove, the Dane, the Churnet, the Tean and the Blithe typically come in as a blend of ‘moderate’ to ‘poor’. But there is a lag in these data: while some figures have been updated in the interim, the last full review by the Environment Agency was in 2022. The next is expected this year.
Read more: Spotlight Winter 2025 – What can WE do about river...
Issues around water have never been far from the headlines this year, with the flood-related deaths in Valencia just the most tragic (thousands of deaths from climate-related events in poorer countries go less reported).
Closer to home, some English counties (including Staffordshire) suffered three times their average rainfall in September, according to the Met Office. Flooding in the south of the Moorlands made the local news; across the country the changing weather patterns have slashed farm yields, eroded soils and flooded fields.
With the second worst harvest on record, around £1bn of food production was lost.
Weather is complex, of course, and there are some special factors at play (the world is still in the wetter part of the El Nino/La Nina cycle). But there are some simple underlying figures. For every one degree rise in temperature, the atmosphere can hold 7% more moisture.
According to the internationally respected World Weather Attribution group, the exceptional UK rainfall from October 2023 to March 2024 was made four times more likely by climate change (and 20% heavier).
Ultimately, the only way to prevent these weather patterns becoming even more severe is to stop the pace of global warming – climate mitigation – but as these events show, climate change is already here.
That’s why adaption – making people and places more resilient to the effects of climate change are – has steadily crept up the agenda.
Read more: Spotlight Autumn 2024 - Water, water everywhere, nor any...
Like most other organisations, we at MCA have been reviewing our use of the social media platform X (formally known as Twitter). We didn't use it heavily but thought it should be available for our members. In the light of recent developments, we have now decided to leave. The next question is, do we look for a platform to take its place? Some have suggested Bluesky, others that we just let it go.
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Our Nature team has been busy getting out the news on our Staffordshire Wildlife Trust-led Nature in Your Neighbourhood project. MCA is a partner, alongside Keele University, OUTSIDE Arts, SCVYS youth service and Staffs Moorlands Council. Among the many events we have attended recently was a local branch meeting of the Wildlife Trust’s where the subject was 'Life in The Ravines’ a replanting project to recover from the effects of ash dieback in the valleys of the Peak District National Park. Here is Val Riley (recently awarded an MBE for her voluntary service for nature) pointing to a potential site she has identified for Nature in Your Neighbourhood.
- Leek Textile Week
- Climate Expo and Sustainability Conference
- Action West End Family Fun Day
- Show Time
- Warslow and Foxlowe Repair Cafes
- Our AGM - and Ecobrick Progress
- Leek and District Show 2024
- Website Upgrade
- Spotlight Summer 2024 - Renewable Energy on our Turf?
- HuG 2024
- Spotlight Spring 2024 - Hope Springs Eternal…
- Spotlight Winter 2024 - Conversation with Karen